Saturday, 8 July 2017

“There are two
great days in a person’s life - the day we are born and the day we discover
why.” - William Barclay

Nicola (Nicolò) Fiorenza (born after
1700 in Naples; died 13 April 1764) was an Italian violinist and composer of
the Neapolitan Baroque period.

Reliable
biographical information concerning Fiorenza is extremely scarce, thus little
is known about his schooling. Fiorenza was educated at the Conservatory of S.
Maria di Loreto, presumably also by Francesco Barbella. In 1726 Fiorenza was a
cellist in the Neapolitan Royal Chapel (Court) orchestra, replacing Francesco
Alborea who had moved to Vienna. He later got a steady job as a violinist.

In 1743 Fiorenza
and four other equally qualified candidates were vying to become the head of
the strings class at the Conservatory. The decision was to be made by drawing
lots. Fiorenza drew the winning lot and became teacher of the class of the
Institute that was led by Francesco Durante. However, from around 1760, claims
were made against Fiorenza that he beat and mistreated his students resulting
in some of them abandoning their studies. For this reason, the management of
the Conservatory was forced to dismiss Fiorenza in 1762. From 1758 he held the
post of concert master or head violinist of the Royal Chapel Orchestra, as
successor to Domenico de Matteis.

At the end of
1762 Fiorenza was fired from the Conservatory owing to longstanding complaints
about his rough treatment of musicians. Fiorenza died less than two years
later, and little else is known about his life.

Fiorenza’s
musical legacy consists of about thirty traditional hand-written compositions
that date from the period between 1726 and 1736. However, it is assumed that
during the period he taught at the Conservatory he wrote more works. His
surviving works, mostly instrumental, are collected in a manuscript at the
Naples Conservatory S. Pietro a Majella: Fifteen concertos for different
combinations of instruments and nine symphonies, some of which are enlivened by
virtuoso solos or wind instruments, which make them comparable to the concerto
form. The currently available works include violin sonatas, trio sonatas,
string symphonies with three and four violins and solo concerts for various
instruments. Stylistically, his works range from the strict pattern of Corelli’s
church sonatas to the ‘galant’ work of Durante.

Here are some of
his concertos and chamber works performed by Dolce &Tempesta:

Friday, 7 July 2017

Do you have some
cream that has been in your fridge a few days past its use-by date? You know it’s
still good, smells OK, but maybe it’s just turning? Well, use it all up by baking
some scones that need some of this “turning” cream and no butter, nor eggs.
They will taste wonderful and fluffy and there will be no hint of sourness!

CREAM SCONES

Ingredients

450g self-raising
flour, plus extra to dust

2 teaspoons
baking powder

2 tablespoons
icing sugar

200mL thickened
cream (“turning”)

125 mL cold
water

Pinch of salt

Vanilla essence

Some sultanas
(optional)

Milk, to brush

Method

Place an oven
rack in the top third of oven. Preheat a fan-forced oven to 200˚C. Lightly dust
baking paper with self-raising flour and place on a metal baking sheet.

Sift flour,
baking powder and icing sugar into a large mixing bowl. Add the sultanas (if
you are using them) and stir to cover with flour. Add the cream, vanilla essence and the cold
water. Cut and fold mixture using a spatula until it starts to come together.

Form mixture
into a ball with floured hands. Place ball on baking paper, dust fingertips
with flour and knead lightly until just smooth and slightly springy. Do not
overwork. Mould the dough to roughly form a square, about 2cm deep.

Dust the spatula
with flour and use the edge to cut the dough into scone shapes. Gently separate
each scone.

Brush the tops
of the scones with a little milk. Bake the scones for 12 minutes or until
golden brown.

Split the warm
scones and serve with thick cream or butter, and jam or marmalade if desired.

Tuesday, 4 July 2017

Welcome to the Travel Tuesday meme! Join me every Tuesday and showcase your creativity in photography, painting and drawing, music, poetry, creative writing or a plain old natter about Travel.

There is only one simple rule: Link your own creative work about some aspect of travel and share it with the rest of us. Please use this meme for your creative endeavours only.

Do not use this meme to advertise your products or services as any links or comments by advertisers will be removed immediately.

Los Angeles (Spanish for “The
Angels”), officially the City of Los Angeles and often known by its initials
L.A., is the cultural, financial, and commercial centre of Southern California.
With a U.S. Census-estimated 2016 population of 3,976,322, it is the
second-most populous city in the United States (after New York City) and the
most populous city in the state of California. Located in a large coastal basin
surrounded on three sides by mountains reaching up to and over 3,000 m, Los
Angeles covers an area of about 1,210 km2. The city is also the seat of Los
Angeles County, the most populated county in the country. Los Angeles is the
centre of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with 13,131,431 residents, and is
part of the larger designated Los Angeles-Long Beach combined statistical area
(CSA), the second most populous in the nation with a 2015 estimated population
of 18.7 million.

Los Angeles City
Hall (above), completed 1928, is the centre of the government of the city of Los
Angeles, California, and houses the mayor’s office and the meeting chambers and
offices of the Los Angeles City Council. It is located in the Civic Center
district of downtown Los Angeles in the city block bounded by Main, Temple,
First, and Spring streets.

The building was
designed by John Parkinson, John C. Austin, and Albert C. Martin, Sr., and was
completed in 1928. Dedication ceremonies were held on April 26, 1928. It has 32
floors and, at 138 m high, is the tallest base-isolated structure in the world,
having undergone a seismic retrofit from 1998 to 2001 so that the building will
sustain minimal damage and remain functional after a magnitude 8.2 earthquake.The
concrete in its tower was made with sand from each of California's 58 counties
and water from its 21 historical missions.

City Hall’s
distinctive tower was based on the shape of the Mausoleum of Mausolus, and
shows the influence of the Los Angeles Public Library, completed shortly before
the structure was begun. An image of City Hall has been on Los Angeles Police Department
badges since 1940. To keep the City’s architecture harmonious, prior to the
late 1950s the Charter of the City of Los Angeles did not permit any portion of
any building other than a purely decorative tower to be more than 46 m. Therefore,
from its completion in 1928 until 1964, the City Hall was the tallest building
in Los Angeles, and shared the skyline with only a few structures having
decorative towers, including the Richfield Tower and the Eastern Columbia
Building.

City Hall has an
observation deck, free to the public and open Monday through Friday during
business hours. The peak of the pyramid at the top of the building is an
airplane beacon named in honour of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, cf Lindbergh
Beacon. Circa 1939, there was an art gallery, in Room 351 on the third floor,
that exhibited paintings by California artists. The building was designated a
Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1976.

Monday, 3 July 2017

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.” - Terry Pratchett

Bastet was a goddess in ancient Egyptian religion, worshiped as early as the 2nd Dynasty (2890 BCE). As Bast, she was the goddess of warfare in Lower Egypt, the Nile River delta region, before the unification of the cultures of ancient Egypt. Her name is also translated as Baast, Ubaste, and Baset. In Greek mythology, she is also known as Ailuros (Greek for “cat”, αἴλουρος). The uniting Egyptian cultures had deities that shared similar roles and usually the same imagery.

In Upper Egypt, Sekhmet was the parallel warrior lioness deity. Often similar deities merged into one with the unification, but that did not occur with these deities having such strong roots in their cultures. Instead, these goddesses began to diverge. During the 22nd Dynasty (c. 945–715 BCE), Bast had transformed from a lioness warrior deity into a major protector deity represented as a cat. Bastet, the name associated with this later identity, is the name commonly used by scholars today to refer to this deity.

What the name of the goddess means remains uncertain. One recent suggestion by Stephen Quirke (Ancient Egyptian Religion) explains it as meaning “She of the ointment jar”. This ties in with the observation that her name was written with the hieroglyph for ointment jar (bas) and that she was associated with protective ointments, among other things. The name of the material known as “alabaster” might, through Greek, come from the name of the goddess.

Bastet was originally a lioness warrior goddess of the sun throughout most of ancient Egyptian history, but later she was changed into the cat goddess, which is familiar today. Greeks occupying ancient Egypt toward the end of its civilisation changed her into a goddess of the moon. As protector of Lower Egypt, she was seen as defender of the pharaoh, and consequently of the later chief male deity, Ra. Along with the other lioness goddesses, she would occasionally be depicted as the embodiment of the Eye of Ra. She has been depicted as fighting the evil snake named Apep, an enemy of Ra.

Images of Bastet were often created from alabaster. The goddess was sometimes depicted holding a ceremonial sistrum in one hand and an aegis in the other (the aegis usually resembling a collar or gorget embellished with a lioness head). Her name was associated with the lavish jars in which Egyptians stored their ointment used as perfume. Bastet thus gradually became regarded as the goddess of perfumes, earning the title of perfumed protector. In connection with this, when Anubis became the god of embalming, Bastet came to be regarded as his wife for a short period of time. Bastet was also depicted as the goddess of protection against contagious diseases and evil spirits.

Bastet was a local deity whose religious sect was centered in the city of Bubastis, which lay in the Nile Delta near what is known as Zagazig today. The town, known in Egyptian as pr-bastt (also transliterated as Per-Bast), carries her name, literally meaning House of Bast. It was known in Greek as Boubastis (Βούβαστις) and translated into Hebrew as Pî-beset, spelled without the initial ‘t’ sound of the last syllable. In the biblical Book of Ezekiel 30:17, the town appears in the Hebrew form Pibeseth.

More than 300,000 mummified cats were discovered when Bastet’s temple was excavated. Some mummies of people have been found to have their pet cats mummified and placed in their tombs with them. The main source of information about the Bastet cult comes from Herodotus who visited Bubastis around 450 BCE after the changes in the religious sect. He equated Bastet with the Greek Goddess Artemis. He wrote extensively about the religious sect. Turner and Bateson suggest that the status of the cat was roughly equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might leave a family in great mourning and those who could would have them embalmed or buried in cat cemeteries—pointing to the great prevalence of the cult of Bastet. Extensive burials of cat remains were found not only at Bubastis, but also at Beni Hasan and Saqqara. In 1888, a farmer uncovered a plot of many hundreds of thousands of cats in Beni Hasan.

Cats in ancient Egypt were revered highly, partly due to their ability to combat vermin such as mice, rats (which threatened key food supplies), and snakes, especially cobras. Cats of royalty were, in some instances, known to be dressed in golden jewelry and were allowed to eat from their owners’ plates. Because domestic cats tend to be tender and protective of their offspring, Bastet was also regarded as a good mother, and she was sometimes depicted with numerous kittens. Consequently, a woman who wanted children sometimes wore an amulet showing the goddess with kittens, the number of which indicated her own desired number of children.

Sunday, 2 July 2017

Sergey Vasilyevich Ivanov
(Russian: Сергей Васильевич Иванов; 1864-1910) was a Russian genre and history
painter, known for his Social Realism. His father was a tax collector for the
Customs Service. Sergey displayed an early talent for art, but his father was
opposed on the grounds that it would not be a secure way to make a living so,
at the age of eleven, he was enrolled at the Konstantinov Land Surveying
Institute.

Surveying was
not to his liking and he was an indifferent student, so a family friend who was
an amateur artist encouraged his father to send him to the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (MSPSA). With a recommendation from Vasily
Perov, he began attending classes there in 1878; studying with Illarion
Pryanishnikov and Evgraf Sorokin. He left there in 1882 to attend the Imperial Academy
of Arts.

Dissatisfaction
with the Academy’s administration, as well as financial difficulties forced him
to return to Moscow in 1884. He went back to the MSPSA and graduated in 1885.
At that time he started work on a series of paintings devoted to
“Pereselenchestvo”, the process of resettling peasants to outlying, vacant
areas (mostly in Siberia) in an attempt to ease overcrowding in the villages
after the Emancipation reform of 1861. The move was often very arduous and many
died on the way. From 1885 to 1889, he toured the provinces of Samara, Saratov,
Astrakhan and Orenburg, documenting the migrants’ lives. This was followed by a
series on convicts.

In the mid
1890s, he began to focus on historical works. In 1899, he became a member of
the Peredvizhniki, but was soon dissatisfied with their emphasis on “lovely
scenes”. In 1903, he was one of the founders of the “Union of Russian Artists”,
temporarily replacing the better-known “Mir Isskutsva”. In 1905, the Imperial
Academy conferred on him the title of “Academician”. Later that year, during
the Moscow Uprising, he made numerous sketches while also helping the wounded.
From 1903 to 1910, he taught at the MSPSA. He was also known as an illustrator,
creating drawings for classics by Gogol, Lermontov and Pushkin, among others.
He died of a heart attack at his dacha near the Yakhroma River.

The painting
above is “Death of a Migrant” from 1889. The stark realism of this work draws
attention to the plight of the countless peasants who were resettled
willy-nilly to the under-populated Siberian plains. Many did not make it and
Ivanov records in this painting the fate of the hapless family who have lost
father and husband on the migration route.

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Welcome to Nicholas V's Blog on Blogger

I have been blogging daily on this platform for several years now. It is surprising that I have persisted as the world is changing and "microblogging" is now the norm. I blog to amuse myself, make comment on current affairs, externalise some of my creativity, keep notes on things that interest me, learn something new and to surprise myself with things that I discover about this wonderful, and sometimes crazy, world we live in.

I sometimes get the impression that I am on a soapbox delivering a monologue, so your comments are welcome.